A Simple Choice
by E. Griffin
Summary: In the aftermath of a trap, a victim sits there, in the face of death, and makes a choice.


**A Simple Choice**

**By: **Maggie Griffin

**Summary: **In the aftermath of a trap, a victim sits there, in the face of death, and makes a choice.

* * *

Her hands were burning. After the initial panic of the moment had worn off and she had come to terms with the fact that her hands were coated in blood, guts, and death, all she could feel was the fire on her skin. She wondered, dimly, if the pain moving along fingertip by fingertip and up her arms, hadn't come to seep there on purpose. If by some chance, somehow, the blood of the man she had cut open just a short moment ago hadn't found a way to melt into her flesh and spread fire along her veins.

Then again, maybe it was just withdrawal. Sweat and blood and urine--the man had been alive after all--permeated her senses and made her sick to her stomach. Still, she managed to grasp onto that last remaining shred of her dignity--she could have laughed. _Dignity_--by not vomiting.

Somewhere ahead of her a door had opened and she had retreated backwards, back pressing against the wall behind her. But that had been a few minutes back, she thought, and now there were three occupants in that dark room.

There was something else as well. A sense, a taste, of something almost _metallic._ Something sterile and cold and sick. Still, she didn't recognize it. Instead, she concentrated on the doll. It wasn't like any she had ever seen. A dummy that sat there and spoke to her, words she hadn't understood at first, in the immediate aftermath of what she had done, but ones that had slowly come into sense after a while.

_Life. Appreciating life._

The doll stared down at her with a condescending air, it's eyes black and emotionless and its wooden mouth slightly askew, as if expecting to rebut some argument. As though she might disagree and scream and cry at it. As though she might find strength enough to rise to her feet and kick it across the room. She thought about it. About the satisfaction it might give to lift it from its perch and shatter that all-knowing face against the ground. Step on it and put out the light in those lifeless eyes that seemed, somehow, more alive than hers.

_Dead eyes._

Her eyes, not any other. Her eyes had always looked dead, whenever she had tried to see inside them. Trying to see behind those eyes had always revealed...nothing. A glassy whiteness, an after-effect of her life and the drugs. Too much dope and dirt had seemed to wipe her clean and leave her with a doll face. And her real face face--a living face--had somehow come to be plastered on that of a dead doll.

It didn't belong there, she thought.

"Let me go...," she murmured, her voice barely above a whisper.

_What for? _The doll asked.

"I w-want to live."

_What for?_

Somewhere deep inside her, something was slipping. Something was slipping and something else was opening, and, quite suddenly, she felt an urge to pull at the face of that doll and take back what it had taken from her.

_I took nothing from you,_ it argued.

No, she considered. She supposed it hadn't. Nothing she hadn't given away all on her own, anyway. Still, she wanted something back and knew that it had to be taken back now or it never would be. Somehow, she knew that. Now or never.

"I want to live."

"What for?"

For a moment, she thought the doll to have spoken and pressed up against the wall for it more so. But a great, looming shadow had come to hover over the doll like some grisly reaper and she wondered who it was there for. She supposed, being less alive than the doll, it was there for her. So she rose, shakily, to her feet and came to meet it, until only the doll separated them.

Only then did she realize that it was death who had spoken and only because it asked her once more.

"What for?"

She suppressed a shudder and forced her eyes from the ground and to her collector, brown eyes meeting blue and finding that death didn't look as frightening as she would have perceived. Instead, she found, beneath the reaper's cloak he wore, that while his skin was bone white and his eyes that haunting blue and filled with death, he seemed very much alive.

_Everyone is alive but me._

She opened her mouth to speak and found it difficult. The words were there, somewhere in the back of her throat, but she found it impossible to expel anything but a strangled sob. She hugged herself then and would have fallen back down had the wall behind her not stopped her fall. So instead, she leaned against it on bent knees and kept a look on that dead-alive face.

"You survived, didn't you?" Death asked her. "You survived and now you've learned something, something very important. Haven't you?"

She nodded, even as tears flowed down her cheeks and clouded her vision until he became a blurry black mess shimmering in front of her. Still, his voice was painfully clear and every word made her want to cry harder.

"Then why are you crying?"

It was a simple, soft question. There was no malice behind it. There was no anger and no hate. There wasn't the comfortable murmur of a drug-induced haze to make it sound like any of those things. Instead there was a painful clarity brought forth from her near brush with death and the knowledge that brush had gifted her with. So she tried, so hard, to put that into words.

"I-I..."

"Why are you crying?"

Somehow, he was standing closer and his hand was on her cheek and it wasn't there to hit her or to do things to her. It was just _there._ She didn't shy from it but leaned into him instead, her arms limp at her sides and her face buried in his death cloak. She wasn't angry or sad when he didn't come to bring his arms around her. He didn't step away and that was enough.

Vaguely, she thought he might have asked her why she was crying and she might have said because she was sorry. _So_ sorry. For wasting her life and because her living face was gone and all the dead things around her--even death itself--seemed more alive than she was.

And he might have promised her, perhaps without speaking, that she might live again, very soon. She just had to decide on living and making the best of that life. She just had to make a single, simple choice.

How could she possibly say no?

_Hello Amanda._

**Fin**


End file.
